They Are We Wish They Weren't
by Emerald Embers
Summary: The Avengers deal with their greatest PR disaster of all; Thor and Loki's relationship. Loki/Thor


Everyone knew what to expect when reading the morning papers after allowing Thor and Loki to handle an incident.

The words, "Oh, Christ" frequently came to mind.

They were often followed by "Not again".

.

After their descent to Earth, Thor and Loki had swiftly become tabloid favourites. They were aliens, good looking aliens at that, and they were both more than willing to talk to reporters. Thor loved telling valiant tales of battle, and Loki had developed a reputation for wit rivalling Oscar Wilde's. They saved the world with comforting regularity regardless of whether they were or weren't accompanying the Avengers at the time, and they did it with style.

That would have been enough to sell pages in any paper.

The fact they appeared to be joined at the hip in an all too literal way just added fuel to the fire.

.

"Oh, Christ," Tony muttered, JARVIS having opted to wake him up by playing voicemail from SHIELD demanding damage control alongside the clip that had attracted attention, "Not again."

He wouldn't pretend he'd never woken up to porn or pseudo-porn before, but he could have done with a bit of warning before being shown a one minute video of Loki freeing Thor from rubble, pinning him back against it, and kissing him.

At least no tongue action had been involved - not that Tony was checking - but it was nonetheless a really, really long and uncomfortably passionate kiss. Between brothers.

"How many times am I going to have to ask you to explain that incest is wrong?" Tony had paid little attention to the first voicemail, but it was hard to ignore Director Fury's familiar dulcet tones.

"Try telling that to gods," Tony said, before waving for JARVIS to cut off the stream of too much information and attempting to smother himself with a pillow.

.

The problem with trying to stop Thor and Loki kissing where other people could see was that neither of them understood what was wrong about brothers kissing in public. On Asgard they had effectively defined "public" as "amongst lesser beings", and Loki saw all Midgardians as lesser; in addition, Asgard also had a god who could literally see everything, so "out of other people's sight" didn't count for much either. "Out of camera sight" had resulted in Thor actively destroying cameras wherever he went, and had been considered worse PR than the kissing because CCTV footage and the lack of inter-planetary laws were often all that prevented hideous court cases against the Avengers.

Giving up on defining "public" and trying to stop them from kissing in general had proven to be the quickest way of earning a spear-swipe or hammer-smash to the face. It also frequently lead to even more kissing, mostly due to Loki being a contrary bastard and Thor taking offence to having his love for his brother be seen as wrong.

.

As far as Tony was concerned, he had already told Thor and Loki to quit it enough times that he had earned the right to forget about their kissing as much as possible and simply live in denial of the uncomfortably close brothers under his roof. Designing entirely separate floors for the two of them hadn't stopped Loki from sharing Thor's bedroom. All in all, Tony had put more effort and more money into trying to make them behave than he ever had into other people's relationships, and he had failed.

He had endured enough headaches and enough bruises in the pursuit of educating Asgardians about human social norms. He had never asked to be the moral leader of the group.

It was someone else's turn to take charge.

.

.

SHIELD had no intentions of letting two gods wander around unattended on their days off, and had put Clint in charge of keeping an eye on Thor, Natasha in charge of keeping an eye on Loki. Given the Asgardians tended to stick together pretty much every second of every day, that worked out just fine for Clint, allowing him to take bathroom breaks or food breaks without logging them first by leaving Natasha on monitoring duty. It also allowed him to catch up with Natasha as much as she was willing to allow, and they had started making plans to bring popcorn and hot dogs along for the longer stretches of spying.

Despite being gods, Thor and Loki tended to spend most of their time sparring, reading, or generally just lazing about, having decided Earth wasn't worth exploring much; as such, they were easy enough to monitor while being just interesting enough that falling asleep on the job wasn't much of a risk. Natasha had been working on a drinking game to perk things up further, but she was keeping quiet about her exact plans for it - all Clint knew so far was that she had decided against including kisses as a shot-worthy event for the safety of her liver. Clint knew better than to try and have a say in it, but if he were allowed, he would have also suggested banning massages from the list. Loki should have had the least tense back in all the universe after the attention Thor paid to it every time his hands got bored.

Nonetheless, despite the consistency of his mark and having Natasha to keep him company, the job had some downsides.

.

"Oh Christ," Clint said, setting his bow down for a moment and turning to Natasha, whose hands were gripping her binoculars a little too tight.

"Not again," she murmured, but kept her eyes on the scene despite the discomforted twist of her lips.

SHIELD didn't require the logging of all the times Thor and Loki had kissed or cuddled, though sometimes Clint added the details into his reports just to torment the poor bastards who had to read them. Tallies would be included. On boring days, they were accurate.

However, he and Natasha were supposed to note any time Thor and/or Loki did something illegal. Destroying what had been an electrified fence in order to break into a stranger's back yard and go skinny-dipping in their pool definitely counted as illegal.

Clint wasn't certain as to just how additionally illegal two grown brothers wrestling naked in a pool was, but he hoped the answer was _very_.

"Is the water distorting my view or is Thor in proportion?" Natasha asked, eyes still covered by the binoculars and the rest of her face all too unreadable.

Clint risked a broken wrist by smacking her across the back of the head. She knew how his brain worked, and that her question meant he would have to start looking at Thor's crotch until he could tell her the answer. "Is Loki?" he asked in return, figuring only half a second later that it probably hadn't been the wisest or snappiest of his comebacks.

"I couldn't say," Natasha replied, licking her lips, and Clint wondered if he should request a change of partner in his next report.

.

.

Bruce rarely ventured outside his lab or the kitchen during his visits, and as such hadn't noticed anything more suspect than how Thor and Loki would happily steal food or drink from each other at the dinner table, which qualified as perfectly normal brotherly behaviour in his world view.

The Hulk saw a lot more, but didn't care.

.

.

"Oh no," Steve said, still not entirely comfortable with blasphemy despite the situation arguably calling for it, "Not again."

"Be thankful you just got the stills," Tony replied, not bothering to glance at the newspaper. Steve didn't entirely trust using the internet for news - anything that wasn't on printed paper seemed too easy to change - but he was willing to guess on this occasion he and Tony were discussing the same thing.

"You did tell them, didn't you?" Steve asked, folding the paper up neatly and setting it down on the table in case anyone else wanted to read it despite the lurid front page. "That they're - that that's not right."

"Yes," Tony said, "Repeatedly. They're not listening to me."

Steve looked up sharply. "I'm not -"

"Yes, you are," Tony interrupted. "If they're not listening to me, then as our noble leader, it's your turn to try and make them listen. Besides, you're a lot harder to break than I am."

Steve couldn't think of a decent rebuttal. He had more or less become the unofficial leader of the Avengers despite Tony seeming to do most of the organisational work, and therefore he did have to take some responsibility for their behaviour. What had been fairly ordinary cereal started to taste a lot like cardboard in his mouth.

Apparently satisfied now that he had delivered Steve's orders, but not quite done with being a complete bastard, Tony handed over the dregs of his coffee with a grin.

"You're going to need this."

.

JARVIS was willing to propose several different approaches based on Tony's failures, dubious advice from the internet, and less dubious but still seemingly impractical suggestions from medical journals, but Steve guessed the best way to tackle the situation was head-on. Loki could sniff out uncertainty like a bloodhound and loved to pick apart the most carefully constructed arguments, so going in over-confident with a plan would invite disaster. Moreover, Steve had bonded with Thor in the past over their shared dislike of most modern technology, and Thor did seem to be fond of blunt honesty.

Steve paced outside Thor's room for a moment, bent over and touched his toes, stretched up again and rolled his shoulders, before requesting that JARVIS open the door.

Steve quickly wished he'd spent more time listening to JARVIS.

.

Loki's head was tilted to his right as he moaned, his lips curved around and sucking on Thor's thumb. That alone would have been enough to declare their actions un-brotherly. The fact that both of them were naked and fisting each other's cocks was icing on the incestuous cake.

Steve heard sounds coming out of his own mouth in response to the sight, but he was fairly certain none of them were actual words.

Thor looked over briefly and laughed before returning his attention to Loki's neck and licking a long, wet stripe over it.

Loki didn't bother to look. He simply lifted a hand, gestured at the door, and made it slam shut with no care for Steve's nose.

"Jesus Christ," Steve blasphemed. The situation called for it.

.

.

It wasn't quite an intervention that they called in the end, even if it looked like one. Tackling their incestuous alien brothers problem with a direct approach hadn't worked any better than an indirect one, and nobody wanted to risk seeing anything more - or anything at all in Bruce's case, given he'd been rather alarmed to find out that the creepily incestuous tabloid photos actually were of creepy incest.

The mission to stop Loki and Thor from kissing had been an utter failure. No one intended to start a mission to make them keep their clothes on.

A mission to make them keep their doors locked on the other hand? That had potential.

And it would save Tony another morning of mopping up Steve's nosebleeds.


End file.
